Friday, November 09, 2012

Recovering and rebooting after Campaign 2012

Goodbye to Seamus, the Irish Setter that 29 years ago rode 650 miles in a crate strapped to the roof of Mitt Romney’s family station wagon, and to Rafalca, Romneys’ Olympic-caliber dancing horse.

Goodbye to President Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” and “the private sector is doing fine,” to Romney’s “corporations are people,” “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” and to all the other infelicitous phrases about which the dueling presidential campaigns made too much.

May we not think of them again. At least not until the definitive books on campaign 2012 are published. At that point we can recall with self reproach the trifling distractions of this exhausting political slog and resolve, fruitlessly, to focus on only the important issues next time.

Lena Dunham

Goodbye to Clint Eastwood arguing with an empty chair at the Republican National Convention and to Lena Dunham comparing sex to voting for Obama in a skeezy commercial. Goodbye to arguments about Romney’s old tax returns and about exactly what the Obama administration said to whom and when about the attack in Benghazi.

Goodbye, in fact, to the entire effort to portray Obama as a corrupt, Kenyan-born socialist Muslim in the thrall of his terrorist pals and his radical, America-hating former pastor; as a terrifyingly inept beneficiary of affirmative action whose only talent is reading speeches off a TelePromTer and who would destroy our way of life if he weren’t too stupid to pull it off.

That effort kinda failed. And though it persisted all the way up until Tuesday — really, haters, you’re still obsessing about Obama’s “57 states” gaffe from May, 2008, and his 2005 real estate transaction with Tony Rezko? — voters weren’t buying. And now that he’s been re-elected and will never run for office again, there’s even less point than ever to deranged expressions of contempt and paranoia.

Hello to looking ahead, to fighting over policy not symbolism and to taking umbrage over meaningful differences not trivialities.

Hello, I hope, to the era of seriousness in Washington.

With luck, it’ll last a few months before the next round of frivolity begins.

Posted at 04:26:55 PM

Comments

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Ditto every comment thus far. Per Sandy K, the conspiracy theories went live within minutes of the Petraeus announcement yesterday. Some thought that the resignation was timed to avoid testifying before the Benghazi committee, which is ludicrous because the committee can still force Petraeus to appear anyway. But don't worry, the conspiracy mongers will find a way to make the Petraeus resignation fit into some vague, grand conspiracy theory.

It can be difficult to keep track of all the conspiracies and their interconnections. Fortunately, Mother Jones just published a helpful Venn diagram. Do Benghazi and Petraeus belong at the intersection of Power Mad Dictator and Radical Leftist, or Muslim Leftist and Kenyan/not one of us? In a sane political world, this would be parody, but the MJ diagram is absolutely faithful to the world as portrayed in the right-wing fever swamp.

You'd have to be a man to really understand the answer to that one, Wendy. The best of us can, most of the time ... or at least sometimes. But other times, we just can't. It's as simple as that. Three words: We. Just. Can't.

I'm not sure if that was a rhetorical question, but the answer is that much of our mental life is driven by conflicting, unconscious rules of thumb that were determined by natural selection. Messing with thy neighbor's wife might lead to more progeny, but the same tendency can also get a person killed by a reproductive competitor. Our forerunners who shrank from the mating competition produced fewer offspring, yet, at the same time, those who were utterly heedless in their promiscuity may have also suffered in the progeny competition as a result of other males smashing big rocks over their heads while they slept.

And so our reproductive inheritance includes two powerful, competing, hardwired heuristics: do it/don't do it. It's at our own peril that we would overestimate the power of consciousness, reason and judgment when faced with competing imperatives selected in the course of our evolution.

Consider how desperately people may want to lose weight. They know exactly what they need to do, but they keep blowing it over long haul. Is that just because they're weak-willed? No. It's because intense non-conscious heuristics drive eating.

In every commonplace undesirable behavior, we see both selected imperatives and selected prohibitions that are only partially managed by conscious effort. I wouldn't have a job if that wasn't true.

Returning to our recent discussions of hetero, cross-gender friendships, this is why many adults are cautious about forming such relationships. It can be easier to just avoid these situations in the first place, because they are fraught with risk. People may lie to themselves when they are developing these friendships. Then, maybe, an emotional intimacy happens and suddenly they're hiking in the Appalachians because they've got a new soul mate.

In the case of General Petreaus, there were probably hundreds of hours of interview and discussion with his biographer, who is also the woman with whom he had an affair. I imagine that guards had to be dropped in that situation. Empathy is a tool of understanding and probably a requirement in such an arrangement, but that can lead to some pretty intense, intimate feelings that grow so powerful that someone who had never succumbed to the temptation before may well end up doing something that's against all their consciously-held values.

It wasn't quite a rhetorical question and I do understand the genetic influences behind the male sex drive. I just find it hard to believe anyone would risk their career, ambition and political power over so foolish a choice. Especially a man like Petraeus, a severely disciplined ex-general and head of the most sensitive, classified and monitored agency in this country. No matter how high the placement, this one act has destroyed almost every man in a position of power and/or politics going back throughout the years. It's also peculiar to the male of our species, powerful women have never been caught out in this type of behavior.

To Zorn, while I agree the woman is no less despicable, the potential loss in the way of status is no where near what Petraeus is now forced to give up.

With power comes arrogance and opportunity. It's too bad because I had a favorable impression of Petraeus as I did of Mark Sanford once upon a time.

Enjoy the relative calm now because once the GOP gets over its collective shock, it's going to get ugly. A lot of the anger will be directed internally. Boehner is going to have to be perfect to survive. Republicans as finicky as Jets fans right now and Cantor is their Tebow. I think Boehner has done a fine job but no one cares what I think. If they did, i'd tell them I want Priebus out as Chairman and Cornyn out at the NRSC - their performances were disgraceful. Ryan will get some heat (which may be fair) and Christie has taken a lot already (which is quite unfair and shortsighted). I urge the Bush family to not take Tuesday as an invitation to come back. My 2016 nightmare is the clowns in charge deciding that Jeb is just what we need - a swing state governor who appeals to latinos - and ignoring what that family has done to the brand. Finally, I never want to hear from Mourdock or Akin again and I doubt I will.

Petraeus might be exactly the kind of guy who is most vulnerable in such a situation, so I'm far more sympathetic to him than I would be toward someone who's a known hound dog.

Sit anyone down with a listener who falls somewhere on their sexual-attraction palette (or palate), listen to them reliably, empathically and attentively for hundreds of hours, and powerful attractions that resonate at the most primitive levels of emotional life will inevitably emerge. Freud was the first to identify this in his own experience with patients. It happens in any therapist's consulting room if they are empathically attuned to their patients over a period of time. This kind of rapport lights us up at the most primitive levels of need. The feelings that are aroused will mightily resist rational analysis (that's in part what "resistance" in therapy refers to) because they occur at a primitive, non-rational level of experience.

A guy like Petraeus was probably caught completely off-guard and experienced feelings that were either completely unfamiliar to him in their power, or they were feelings that he assumed were part of his long-gone youth and so must represent something real and deep that transcends the normal considerations that have governed his conduct over the last 40 years.

Aren't journalists supposed to eschew dual relationships? I'd lose my license and be sued, justifiably, for engaging in a relationship like this and that's because the tendency for this to occur is so clearly known that the professional prohibitions are codified in law. It doesn't matter that the patient is an adult and what they do for a living doesn't matter. The same thing happens to kings, queens and peons alike in these situations.

GregJ. I seriously doubt this had anything to do with Petreaus abusing his own power. This wasn't Clinton-Lewinsky. Unless it comes out that Petreaus has been a chronic philanderer, this is almost certainly the case of a man who unfortunately didn't know what hit him.

Just because I consider you a friend, I'm going to give you a little helpful advice. Quit fighting Hispanics on immigration, embrace the Dream Act. Your party desperately needs these voters. Stop the attacks on women's reproductive rights, you're still losing more of us every election. Get rid of the nutjobs and boycott Fox News, Rush Limbaugh.
Otherwise, you won't stand a chance in 2016.

"A guy like Petraeus was probably caught completely off-guard and experienced feelings that were either completely unfamiliar to him in their power, or they were feelings that he assumed were part of his long-gone youth and so must represent something real and deep that transcends the normal considerations that have governed his conduct over the last 40 years."

@Dr X,

I bow to your professional expertise, but I believe there is an added component particular to Clinton, Edwards and this case. These men fell for women who attached themselves to them in a close, adoring, almost worshipful manner. Does this not encourage the powerful man to think intimacy is his due, it's somehow right? I do not include Sanford in this opinion; I believe his relationship was one of true mutual attraction.

@Wendy:
The Petraeus Affair came to light when the FBI found that there were emails from Paula Broadwell threatening another woman & that she sent the emails from Petraeus's account.
The FBI first thought that the Petraeus email account was hacked, possibly by a foreign government, but it appears that he gave Broadwell access to the account, presumably a personal one that the FBI monitored.
Washington Post which has a ridiculously long URL that probably won't work here, so I Tiny URLed it http://tinyurl.com/bzltdkt

So Petraeus may have had two mistresses or was simply flirting with another woman, just talking/emailing her & Broadwell went over the top with jealousy.
She should have known better as she was a West Point grad & had 15 years of Army service, where adultery is a court martial offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice & occasionally enforced.
I'm definitely not letting him off the hook here, but it's also obvious that sending men into long-term combat situations, including high ranking general officers who return to the US often for consultations, strains their stateside relationships to the breaking point & they seek companionship elsewhere & Broadwell, being retired Army had much in common with him.

I am very much in favor of women's rights. However, I will never support a party that does not oppose the slaughter of innocent children.

On immigration, there is room for compromise. That time will come only after the border is secured. We fell for that one before.

It's amazing how you draw trend conclusions from one year. I guess 2010 was so traumatic for you, you blocked it out of your mind. Good for you but if your party didn't learn from that, they are making a huge mistake.

Greg, you keep bringing up 2010 like a talisman, but the only thing that really happened was that the GOP took over the House by appealing to concentrated pockets of far-right enthusiasm. There's certainly a market for that, as 2010 proved, and that will likely be the case for the foreseeable future. But 2010 was not the cataclysm you seem to think it was.

The kind of candidates the Rs are largely running these days, and the positions they force them to adopt (or pretend to adopt) to get through the primaries, struggle mightily when forced to face a broader voting population. This was true in 2010 as well. You say it's only because of flawed messengers, but it's a lot of the positions themselves that are increasingly unpopular outside of the R base no matter who espouses them. The fact that riled-up right-wingers can deliver a bunch of concentrated congressional districts doesn't change that.

What I'm doing is using 2010 and other recent elections to argue against others using 2012 to draw overconfident conclusions about the future. I've been down that path in other threads so you'll forgive me, I hope, if I don't want to repeat myself here. You should click on the "Fine Lines" thread and see in particular my comment from Thursday, November 8 at 1120pm where I linked to comments I made immediately after the 2010 elections. You'll see that I most certainly did not use 2010 as any predictor of what will happen in the future.

In 2012, Republicans lacked a messenger. We have plenty of conservatives winning recent elections in blue and swing states, but we have yet to tap them for the big job. That must change in 2016.

ZORN REPLY -- I would not say that the Republican party is finished or that this rather narrow victory for the Democrats signals some permanent realignment. What I would say, however, is that we are clearly liberalizing our culture with regards to gay rights and health care, and those moves aren't going back, just like we're never going to have prayers to Jesus is public schools or have segregated lunch counters or enact a prohibition of alcohol.
A few abortion crazies got beaten but that debate will go on--- and on and on and on -- without much permanent movement in any one direction. Size of govt. issues will continue, as will tax issues... we will move here and then back to there.
Frum had a good piece, i think in the Daily Beast, in which he argued that conservatives are nuts if they think the problem in this election was that their party wasn't harsh enough on abortion, wasn't advocating MORE generous tax treatment for the wealthy and denying MORE rights to gay people and immigrants. I'll see if I can dig that out and post it.

Anyone who thinks that Santorum or a candidate similar to him is the Republican answer in 2016 is just wrong. I voted for Obama and was thrilled when he won. I also took a Republican ballot in this year's primary and voted for Santorum, because I knew if he were the Republican nominee, the results last Tuesday would have been a bloodbath of epic proportions.

Also, by not advocating for full affordable healthcare (to include prevention and immunization), you would be supporting a party that advocates for the slaughter of innocent children by preventable disease.

About "Change of Subject."

"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
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Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.